


Song of Esca, Cunoval's Son

by bunn



Series: The Long Road To Calleva [2]
Category: Eagle of the Ninth Series - Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle (2011)
Genre: Brigantes, Canon Era, Gen, Roman Britain, Slavery, romans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-24
Updated: 2011-05-30
Packaged: 2017-10-19 18:16:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunn/pseuds/bunn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fall of his father Cunoval, Esca is enslaved.  All Esca says about that in the book Eagle of the Ninth, is: "They sold me to a trader from the South, who sold me to Beppo, here in Calleva"  Yet, that sentence covers two years of Esca's life (in the book, it's seven in the movie). This story explores what happened to Esca and how he ended up in the arena at Calleva where he first met Marcus.  Marcus appears very briefly right at the end.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Different Kinds of Chains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esca wakes up after his family's death and his own serious injury, as a slave. He is bought by a slave trader, his ear is clipped and he is taken South for sale. (Contains child death, threatened child abuse, general grimness.)

They came to make a list of the prisoners, not long after Cunoval's youngest son woke up. Maybe it was a morning, maybe a day. A big man with a sour face and black hair curling from his Roman nose, a brisk little man with a stylus and a wax tablet, and a couple of soldiers behind them. They looked at the Brigantes as a man might look at cows going to market, if they were not very good cows.

It was hard to tell how long it had been. Maybe it was two days before the Romans came? His head hurt too much, and there was a sound in his ears like waves on the shore that didn't seem to come from anywhere.

It was cold, too on the floor of the barn where they had put the prisoners after the battle. And it was so hard to stay above the waves of sleep for long. His head hurt so much, and anyway, it was hard to care much about time. There had been a cart, somewhere, jolting. Then the floor. And cold. His clothes were wet, he must have been knocked into the ditch. Outside the barn, it was raining. Somewhere at the back of the barn, where he couldnt' see, someone was sobbing, very shrill. He wished it would stop. It made it harder to stay under the waves of sleep.

An unqualified period of time later, one of the women gave him some water in a leather cup. Gwen, she was called, it came to him his brother Bri had kissed her once, so long ago, at last year's Beltane fire. It seemed a hundred years ago, in another world. Her hands shook a little when she gave it to him. There seemed no point in drinking, but after all, he was so thirsty.

There were not many other men in the barn, and none of them from his own village. They had all gone down in that final rush as the Roman soldiers came in through the last barricades, his brothers, father, his friends, all gone together on the warrior road, west of the sunset. Even his mother. Leaving him behind. Leaving him somehow, bitterly, alive. Alive, and a prisoner of the Romans.

The big man with the nose walked around the barn, stalking quickly on his long legs, counting. The little man with the stylus had to add a skip to his step to keep up with him. It would have been funny, except that nothing was funny any more.

The big man came to Gwen, sitting near the door with another older woman.

. "Stand" he said, in Latin. She stood. "Turn" - she looked confused, so he took her shoulder and turned her round, looking her up and down with that cattle-market stare again. "Name?" She didn't answer, so he took her shoulder and shook her pointing at her with a long finger.  
" Name?"

"Gwen" she said, and started to say something else, but he had already turned away to speak to the little man and one of the soldiers came up instead pulled her, not unkindly, to stand against the far wall.

It was somehow very difficult to turn and look around at the sobbing person at the back of the barn when the big man went back there. Nobody looked. They looked at the ground, in case they should catch each other's eyes, when the sobbing person would not stand or turn, and was beaten. The sobbing stopped after that.

When the big man came to him at last, he stood, just about. The throbbing in his head almost took him back under the waves, but in the end, the waves retreated enough to let him get to his feet. When the big man told him to turn, he lunged with his fist for his big hairy nose, but somehow it was a very long way away, and he could not move as fast as he had thought. And the soldiers were there, suddenly, competently holding him back. He couldn't even fall over, they held him too well.

"Hmm" said the big man. "Not fit enough with that wound to send off with the recruits. Slave. Needs a few lessons to be saleable. Young though, and strong, if we can get him over the head wound. Lead mines, or the arena? " The big man looked down his long nose at the little man, who nodded and made marks on his tablet.

"Name?" No answer. The thought of the burning smell you got around the lead mines was filling his mind and making it hard to think. He'd ridden past a mine once, three years ago, with his father. It wasn't a place you'd want to go back to, not at all, even riding free on his own bay mare. It wasn't a place you'd want to go back to as a slave.

Not a prisoner, not even an auxiliary recruit, a slave.

"Name?"  
One of the soldiers slapped him . Not hard, but it was enough to send him back under the waves again.

When he awoke again, most of the clansmen and women who had been in the barn had gone. Someone had moved him to lie on a pile of straw and there was a blanket over him. Someone had taken his good thick tunic too, and left him with an old one, patched and thin.

His hands were chained. He wished Gwen would come and bring more water, but he couldn't see her any more.

"Name?" The big man was back, and so were the soldiers. Somehow it didn't seem worth the effort of trying to hit him again, and anyway, it would be awkward to do it with his hands like this.  
" Ysgafnyny bôn ap Cunoval"

"Cunoval?" The big man paused and looked at him with more interest - as a man might look at an unpromising horse with a good pedigree, perhaps. He turned to the man with the stylus " Severus! definitely the arena for this one. They'll pay to see a son of Cunoval fight for his life down South, I'll warrant. Get that red-headed trader with the stupid name to have a look at him once he's patched up. "

He turned back "What was the rest of that mouthful?"  
"Ysgafnyny bôn..."  
"Oh, for fuck's sake, British names! Esca? Near enough. Write him down Esca mac Cunoval, Severus"

Ysgar, he thinks. Ysgar. It means, Enemy. A new name for this new, broken life. As good a name as any.

 

.......

A while later, a little dark man came to bring him bread and a bowl of soup. He told Esca his name was Banno. He seemed somehow familiar, but Esca could not place him.

Esca's head was still throbbing painfully, but he didn't feel nauseous any more and the soup smelled good. "I'm to bring you food and look after you for a while, till you can look after yourself again" Banno told him. Esca wondered why they bothered.

"They don't miss a trick, these Romans. They don't want you dead, they want you fit and on your feet again" said Banno, smiling. He seemed to think this was encouraging news.

Esca looked at him again, and realised that he was one of his own father's slaves, one of the farm workers that his father had kept. Not one of the fifty-one men that his father had sent to Calacum, but an older man. He wondered how Banno had ended up here, but it was too much effort to ask. He curled up on his straw again and went to sleep instead.

It seemed that Banno was allowed to come and go freely from the barn. Nobody seemed to expect that he might run away or choose not to do as he was ordered. Still, he was something familar, and that was a little comfort.

Banno was a talkative man, and that drove Esca almost wild at first. Esca didn't want to talk to anyone just then. But he was a kindly little man in his way too. He washed the old blood off Esca's face, and brought spare bandages to wrap around Esca's wrists to stop his wrists being rubbed raw by the hard edges of the manacles. Once he brought a lump of bread with honey on it from the kitchen, and stayed for an hour to tell Esca in maddening detail about how he'd charmed it from the cook.

Esca's head got better all too quickly. He didn't want to feel better. As long as he could barely stand, that meant there was still some space between now and the future, and no need to think about the past. But before long he was able to stand and walk without swaying, and now the future was right ahead of him and there was nowhere else to go.

" Will you help me get away?" he asked Banno, urgently, when he came to bring a bowl of soup that evening . "They'll let you through the door, if you came back at night you could ..."

The little man shook his head. "No, lad" he said, quite gently, but very firmly.

" You could come with me?"  
"Well, where's the sense in that?" Banno replied "I'm a bee-slave, I've got skills. Soon these Romans will send me South to some estate and I'll tend the bees there. " He smiled, hopeful.

" Maybe I'll even have a house of my own there. They say that some of the Roman beeslaves have their own little houses to stay near the hives... I've never had a house to myself. Maybe I'll find a woman there and bring up children to help me with the bees."

Esca felt cold. "You are happy my father fell" he said, blankly.

Banno looked at him, and shook his head.  
" Your father was a good enough master, and I'm truly sorry that he is dead. But life goes on. They say in the South the sun is warmer and they don't have all this trouble with damp getting into the hives in the winter. I'm looking forward to that"

"Well then, help me get out of the barn? I'll make my own way if I can just get out. Or bring me a knife?"

Banno looked at him for a long moment. "This barn is in the middle of a fort full of soldiers, sir, and a good twenty miles south of your old lands besides. And there's nobody left out there will help you now. I can't. You know what they'd do to me if they knew, and you too as soon as they caught you, which most likely they would. They'd crucify the pair of us, and how would that help?

No, you get well and behave yourself and with a bit of luck they'll sell you somewhere where the food is good, and you can get yourself a trade, like me"

Esca turned away and buried his face in his arms. Banno patted him gently on the shoulder and went away.

Being a slave was humilating, but it was also very boring, Esca soon decided. He was not trusted outside the barn, and although most of the other slaves that slept in the barn went in and out, there were long periods when he was left on his own. The barn door was kept locked with a padlock on the outside, and two guards in sight when it was open.

After a while, once he was sure he had got his balance back, Esca tried hitting one of the guards with a pot, hoping to be able to slip past the other one if he could knock the first one out. It didn't go well. The pot wasn't heavy enough to do any real harm, it was difficult to hit either of them with his hands restrained, and the other man grabbed him. Then the one who had been hit with the pot punched him in the stomach. After that, they dragged him back into the barn and took turns kicking him for a while. Eventually they left him lying in the straw exactly where he had started.

The barn had no windows, so there was nothing to look at, and nothing to do. There were a few chinks in the roof where you could see the sky. It was grey, mostly. He had never sat idle for so long in all his life.

"What happened to the other men that were here, the ones that were captured with me?" he asked Banno one day. He hadn't wanted to know, but the days were so grey and empty that in the end, he wasn't able to not ask. And his mother would have thought that he should know where the rest of his people had gone, even if there was nothing he could do about it.

"Already sold" Banno said. "There weren't many, and there were two traders through here before you woke up - woke up proper, like. One of them was going out of Britain, I think. Someone said ... Dubris? Is that a place?"

"Dubris - it's a port. Somewhere in the South. They bring the wine from Eboracum that way." Esca told him. "How many were there?" Unspoken, the question : how many had died?

"Oh, not many." Banno answered "Maybe twenty, I didn't count... Magunna - she's the potwasher, lovely girl, always has all the gossip, such a pity she has that birthmark I always think when I see her, because her nose is very pretty - told me she heard from one of the tribune's house-slaves that they were quite annoyed about that. They'd wanted prisoners to go for soldiers, but most of them were dead, apart from the very old men. And the ones left mostly injured or too old for soldiers."

"Twenty!" Even fewer left alive than he had thought. "And the women and children?" Esca asked

"A few are still here - well, you know that - but some of them were sold hereabouts, and some were sent off to Eboracum, and some to Londinium, or at least, that was where I heard that trader was going. Your friend Gwen, she was bought by a Roman family who are moving up to one of the Wall forts, seemed like nice people. She asked me to keep an eye on you, when she went."

Esca had feared this, and now he knew for certain. Broken and lost, what were left of his mother's people would be scattered to the four winds . Even if he was free to look for them, he would never be able to bring them back together again. He hoped that they were not all feeling as miserable as he did. He hoped Gwen's new owners would be kind to her, as she had been kind to him.  
..................................

It was, if he had not lost count, rather more than a moon after he woke up, that they came for Esca. The bruises from the beating had almost gone, anyway. The big man with the Roman nose, the little man with the wax tablet, and some red-headed bastard of a Corieltauvi Briton, from his accent. And two soldiers, just in case. It was almost flattering.

Esca tried to hit the big man first, with both hands together. The big man dodged and overbalanced. Then Esca got in a knee in the groin of the Corieltauvi, which was very satisfying, before turning to the open door.

But then one of the soldiers grabbed his shoulders and the other thumped him in the stomach, once, twice, three times, and then he was too winded to try anything else. He'd hoped that they might get angry enough to just run him through and that would be that. Surely that would count as death in battle and the gods would let him pass along the warrior road, even late and alone as he was? He'd hoped so, anyway.

But they didn't even bother with their swords, just gathered him up and dragged him like a sack full of so many turnips. This time they held him down and put an iron collar round his neck, attached to a rough-edged iron chain. The collar was heavy, and very cold at first. They fixed it in place with a bent iron rivet that was hammered into place, while Esca lay on the floor with a pile of heavy soldiers on top of him and concentrated on trying to breathe, and the Romans and the bloody Corieltauvi dusted themselves off and talked about how well Esca had got his strength back and whether this should affect the price the Corieltauvi was paying for him.

They took the shackles off his hands then, which was a relief, even if they were only doing it because the shackles were military property. He tried to focus on the wrists, and ignore the collar, but it was hard. When he got back to his feet, the weight of the chain pulled the collar forward so that it was hard to hold his head up.

It seemed very bright outside the barn after so long, and he could feel a light rain on his face. He squeezed his eyes almost closed against the the light, still trying to get his breath back. A little group of people were standing around a loaded cart. Women, children, a few men - he recognised Banno, who shook his head reprovingly when Esca caught his eye. The soldiers pulled Esca over to the cart and fastened the heavy iron chain which ran from the ring around his neck to a staple on the back of the cart, as if he were an ox being brought home from the market. Only when you bring home an ox, you don't have to use a chain and padlock, Esca thought.

The red headed bastard came and stood in front of him - a safe distance away, he noticed. That knee in the groin must have hurt. Good.

He brought out a small, sharp knife and showed it to Esca.

"My name's Vatto. I'm your owner now." He smiled, and the smile was vicious.

"I'm going to clip your ear now. That's a message, down South where you're going.  
It says, this man is an untrustworthy slave, he might be on the run. Don't let him have food, don't give him a place to sleep, hand him in, there might be a reward.

So,there's no point running. No hiding. Everyone will know what that ear means, as soon as you show your face. "

He turned to the soldiers "Hold him a minute, would you lads?"

The soldiers held him. He tried to push them off, but they both seemed to be made of solid oak, tough and heavy with it.

"Stay still, or I might take your whole ear off" Vatto said, and there was something in his voice that said that he'd be happy enough to do it too.

It bled like fury, for a small wound. After he had cut it, Vatto hacked his hair back as well so it could be clearly seen.

"We aren't going to kill you, so don't bother trying that again." he said "You're worth nothing to me dead, not even a carcass to sell to the knacker's yard. Behave, and we won't make your life miserable. I might even look for a decent buyer for you if you're lucky. Mess me about and you'll pay. Understand?"

Esca said nothing, standing silent and chained to the back of the cart, but he met the Corieltauvi's eyes steadily as the blood ran down over his shoulder.

The Corieltauvi turned away to the men who were waiting with a group of mules behind the cart.  
"Normal rules for prisoners of war for this one" Vatto said, waving a hand at Esca "watch him, he thinks he's a tough one. I don't want him getting loose, I don't want him killing himself, I want him safe and sound and ready for sale." he paused for a moment and added as an afterthought "I don't want him killing any of you lot either, it would wipe out half my profit on him".

"These five" he pointed "are skilled, I want them looked after carefully. These three are virgins, I expect them to stay that way, got that? Saco, Motius, did you hear me? I don't want any repeat of that business in Eboracum. Imilco, get them to tell you what they did in Eboracum and why they are never - going - to - do - it again." The men nodded, looking bored. It was fairly clear that they had heard all of this before. Esca looked round at the group, taking note, now that the dazzle had gone out of his eyes. None of the other slaves, mostly women, were chained, but they didn't look as if they were intending to run away. They stood in a sad group, unarmed and poorly dressed, carrying small bags and parcels, with Vatto's men with their knives and long sticks behind them.

Vatto swung up onto his horse - it was one that had belonged to one of his father's spearmen, Esca realised, a flashy chestnut mare, with rather weak hocks. She snorted and bridled, and Vatto struggled with her for a moment before she calmed and went through the gate. Not used to the savage Roman bit the man was using, Esca thought, before the mulecart started to jolt forward, pulling him forward unexpectedly.  
..................................

The journey was not easy, even though it was slow. The cart bumped slowly along winding lanes between grey stone walls and hawthorn hedges, through small woods where pigs rummaged among the fallen leaves, or between small upland fields where sheep grazed grass that was tired and brownish with the oncoming winter. These were roads that Esca had ridden along in the past on visits to friends or relatives. They looked different now: emptier of people, and unfriendly.

The unenthusiastic mules moved along slowly enough that the grown slaves on foot could easily keep pace with them, but among the group were several children, and a woman carrying a baby. After a couple of miles they became tired and started to lag. The baby began to cry, a thin sound, tearing at the ears.

The baby's mother had been a friend of Esca's brother's wife, and she had often visited their house. The child was named Owen, after his grandfather, Esca remembered, Black Owen they called him, because there was already an Owain in the dun who had brown hair - and his mother was called Elen. He thought that he should perhaps say something to her, but no words came to him.

Banno went to speak to the cartman, and the woman with the baby was pulled up to sit on the tail of the cart.

I should have done that, thought Esca. I should have been the one to speak for her, not Banno, he's just the bee-slave. But the cart was loaded high with wrapped bundles of furs behind the carter and Esca's chain was too short for him to approach the front of it. And in any case, it was very clear that Vatto's men were far more willing to listen to Banno than to hear anything that Esca said.

After a while, two tired, dark-haired children joined Elen, perching on the back of the cart next to Esca. He thought he recognised them, but he did not remember their names or who their parents might have been: they were not from his own dun. They looked suspiciously at him, particularly at the drying blood from his ear. It had soaked into his tunic and made a dark sticky patch. He tried to smile reassuringly at them, but he seemed to have forgotten how to do that.

When they stopped near a village in the evening, Vatto bought bread, and bowls of hot fatty lamb stew for both the slaves and his men to eat. The children were sent to bring Esca his stew and bread while he waited at the cart tail. That made him feel like an ox again, with no choice but to wait, tethered, to be fed, but he thanked them for their help and asked their names.

The girl, perhaps nine years old, was Rian and the boy, a little younger, Tasulo, they told him. They were brother and sister and the children of one of Cunoval's liegemen and a peasant woman, from an isolated farm up in the western hills. Their father had died with Esca's, and they had no idea where their mother might be. They seemed to be both horrified and excited by their first journey : neither of them had ever been more than a few miles from their home before. Neither of them could tell him their exact age: probably, he thought, nobody had bothered to keep count too carefully, or thought that it mattered.

It took them twelve days to get to Deva, and it rained most of the way. Everyone was cold and miserable. Vatto's men handed out spare cloaks and coats from one of the mule-packs to those who did not have them. The cloak Esca was given smelled of mould, and he had to tie it awkwardly to keep it in place, for there was no brooch on it, but he was glad of it none the less, for autumn was turning to winter now, and the wet sucked the warmth from him. He had wondered whether to let the cloak drop and let the cold take him, but that was a slow death, and no death for a warrior, and in the end, he did not do it.

The cart bogged down in the muddy ruts, and every time it did, it had to be shoved and lifted until it clear. It was impossible to dry their clothes when they stopped for the night, though with ten people crammed together into the shelter of each of the shabby leather tents, it was at least bearably warm after a while.

At least two of Vatto's men always slept in the same tent as Esca, to keep an eye on him. He thought of trying to creep away at night, but if he moved, someone was bound to wake. His chain rattled, and anyway he had no confidence that the other slaves would keep quiet if they saw him leaving. Banno certainly would not, he had already made that clear, and with the baby nearby, coughing or wailing thinly, nobody slept deeply.

After the second day they were out of the country that Esca knew well. Vatto took a road that climbed up over the edge of a long, low moorland hill to creep slowly along among the yellowing grass and brown autumn heather. The mist hung heavy over the hilltop that day, and it was hard to tell if the soft mizzle was rain, or if they were walking through the skirts of a cloud.

"Look what I found!" Tasulo said, bouncing up to the cart from the side of the road that morning. "It was over there, just next to that wall!" He was holding out a red deer antler, a good big one, to show Esca.

"That is a fine one" Esca replied. "Five tines! he must be a good big animal. "

"Do you want it?" Tasulo asked, holding it out to him. Esca almost smiled. It was a strange feeling, his face seemed to have forgotten how to do it.

"No, you should keep it." he replied "They make very good knife handles out of those, and dice - you might be able to sell it."

Tasulo looked at the antler with increased interest. "Who can I sell it to?"

"Vatto, perhaps, he is a rich man and a trader, he has coins to spend."

Tasulo looked down at his feet as he walked along. "I don't like him" he whispered.

"Well, I can certainly see your point there" Esca said ruefully, almost touching his ear and remembering just in time that that would hurt. "What about Imilco then? You could ask him to sell it for you"

Tasulo nodded, and sat down in the heather by the side of the road to wait for Imilco's mule. That mule was a rather slow one and always seemed to end up behind all the others. Despite this, Imilco didn't beat it, and for that, Esca liked the man.

When they came down again from the moor's edge, they joined a hard-surfaced Roman road, running straight and uncompromisingly South. There were more and larger farm buildings here, forts along the Roman road and as they went still further South, sometimes villages with Roman-looking rectangular buildings with tiled roofs among the roundhouses. The land became flatter and more open : Esca, born and bred in the hills, felt uncomfortably exposed and ant-like as Vatto's group crawled slowly across the muddy flatlands. A cold autumn wind moved uneasily through the hedgerows, and the dry leaves rattled.

The baby, Owen, died early on the ninth morning they were on the road. He'd been getting weaker each day, even though one of the women had lent his mother a leather bag to try to keep the rain off him, and Vatto's man Imilco had given her an extra blanket. But Owen coughed and coughed, and eventually did not wake.

When Imilco came to tell Vatto about the baby's death that morning, he was standing by the cart, checking that the rain had not got through the wrappings on the precious furs. He did not seem concerned that the child had died.

"The mother will be the easier to sell without it, and after all, they are only worth a few sesterces at best, at that age" he said. "Toss the body behind a bush when we leave".

"I will dig him a grave" Esca said to him. "Give me a spade, and I will dig one. He was a warrior's son: he deserves a grave."

Vatto looked at him in some surprise : it was the first time Esca had spoken to him. "There's a couple of words missing, there" he said. He hit Esca once, hard, in the face with the back of his hand. "Try again."

Esca licked his swelling lip and imagined for a moment, in bloody detail, exactly what he would do to Vatto if he had his spear to hand. Or a dagger. A dagger would be enough: Vatto was no warrior.

"No?" said Vatto. "Very well. Throw it into the bushes, Imilco."

"Please, sir, let me borrow a spade to dig the child a grave" Esca said, hating.

Vatto raised his eyebrows, amused. "Very well spoken. Imilco, get Saco, find this slave a spade, and watch him while he digs."

It did not take long to dig such a small grave in the wet soil. Elen laid the tiny body in the grave herself, and Esca filled it in. They said no words over his body : there seemed to be no words to say.

The day after the baby died, they saw great plumes of white smoke rising to fill the sky ahead of them, merging with the grey of the clouds. Banno, who was walking with Esca that day, wondered aloud if there was a house or a farm burning, and if so, why nobody seemed concerned, or in a hurry to help.

"No, it's not a fire" said Saco, whose mule was next behind the cart. "Those are the steams of the salt-pans, where they boil up foul water and make it into salt - somehow, I don't know how but it seems to need a deal of boiling. We're stopping there tomorrow, master Vatto will be wanting to buy salt and sell on some of those furs - maybe sell some slaves too if there's a buyer."

"What is this place called?" Banno asked him.

Saco laughed and pointed to a milestone by the road. "It says it there: Condate. But you ignorant barbarians don't read do you? How do you know where you are, in a strange place?"

Banno was not offended. "I've never been to a strange place before!" he said, smiling. "But now I am abroad, I shall ask people."

"And if the people don't speak your tongue? In the South they don't speak like you ; some people only speak the soldier's Latin."

Banno looked surprised "How d'ye hear the words of these speaking stones then?"

Saco rolled his eyes. Esca said to Banno: "The lines on the stone carry the message. It is like... perhaps a little like the language of the bees that you were telling me about. You watch where the lines go, and that carries the message."

"Can you understand it, lord?" Banno asked him.

Esca looked at him. "Banno, my name..."

"Yes, I know - Esca. Sorry. Habit". Banno looked apologetic. Esca stretched his neck back and wriggled his shoulders, shifting the collar against the drag of the chain.

"Could I learn it, this writing?" Banno asked him.

"Well, perhaps - the writing is in Latin, so you would have to learn that too. The Romans use it a great deal : they write on wood and on wax. That's why they put such a high price on the wax you make - made - for my father. "

"I can understand it a little. I can read the milestones, anyway. My mother was better at it." - a flash of memory, his father's knife at his mother's throat. He shook his head to clear it, and tried to think about something else.

The road here was busy : traders with carts and loaded mules or oxen: farmers with small herds of pigs or flocks of sheep, messengers on horseback, thundering past just off the road on the cleared softer ground at speed and reminding Esca of his bay mare. He wondered what had happened to her, and hoped her new owner wasn't spoiling her good soft mouth with a Roman bit.

They saw a troop of legionaries that afternoon, marching down the Roman road from Deva through the soft drizzle, guarding heavy ox-wagons laden with soft grey pig-lead and great wooden chests bound with iron bands. Full of silver, someone had said to Banno, and he told Esca, voice full of wonder. Banno had never owned so much as a single silver coin in his life, and he wondered greatly to see such great boxes filled with the stuff.

Condate seemed to be boiling like a kettle, puffing steam in all directions. Great smokes and steams were rising from fires all around the town, but Saco had told truth, there were no buldings burning and people were going about their business as if all the smokes and steams were quite ordinary.

Condate had no grand buildings, no forum or grand basilica like the ones that Esca had seen on a visit to Eboracum, and no straight squared-off Roman streets, just houses, barns, sheds - and fires warming great boiling pans full of water, spread out in no particular order along the roadside. People in muddy brown clothes tended the boiling pans and carried bundles of wood or water in buckets to the fires, and a pair of soldiers strolled between the pans, checking on them and making notes.

Vatto gave the order to stop just outside the town, even though it was only midday. He dismounted near where Esca was helping to heave the cart out of the red sticky mud ( the mules had, as usual, pulled it into an awkward spot when they came off the road, and managed to get it stuck, and this lowland mud was thick stuff: it sucked). Vatto watched Esca thoughtfully as he shoved at the cart and Saco swore at the mules and pulled hard on their halters.

Once the cart was on solid ground again, Vatto spoke: "You... Esca. You're well clear of your own country here, and it's past time you started to behave like a slave, not some wild barbarian. You're no use to me otherwise. So, this is what we are going to do. I'm going to have that collar taken off now.

"If you hit someone, if you run, if you even think about not being exactly where I expect you to be, at all times, then you will be whipped. And this woman will be whipped, too " he gestured to Elen "and these two children. You will watch them being whipped. All four of you will walk afterwards, even if it hurts. Which it will.

"And if you really annoy me - or if I can't find you - or if you kill yourself - I'll give the kids to Motius, and tell him to do - what he did in Eboracum again. And keep doing it until we get to the lead mines : they'll buy what's left. Lead mines are always in the market for children to work the small tunnels : I don't normally sell to them, but I will if you provoke me. And I'll let the help take turns with the woman: I don't allow that normally, it's bad for discipline, but I'm sure they'd enjoy it. "

"So? What do you say?"

Esca was silent, and Vatto pulled the short whip from his belt, and turned towards Tasulo, who cringed back against the cart, away from him, looking at Esca with wide eyes. His sister Rian put her arm around him protectively.

"Yes, sir." Esca said heavily, looking down at the mud. There didn't seem to be anything else he could say.

"Very well" said Vatto, smiling like a fox with a newborn lamb. "My men will be watching you. Everyone will be watching you."

It was a relief to be able to move away from the cart rather than be jolted along next to it, and to be able to hold his head up without an effort again. It was even something of a relief to have something to do other than trudging slowly behind a mulecart and occasionally helping to shove it out of the mud. But he felt almost more weighed down than before.

He followed Vatto when he was ordered to do so, unloaded some of the bundles of wrapped furs, and carried them to a shed. A fat bald man, wearing a heavy leather cloak and hat against the heavy rain that was beating down on the shed roof now, carefully unwrapped and checked each one before signing for them. Two of Vatto's slaves had been sold too, and they were signed over, just like the furs. Then Esca helped to load a borrowed handcart with heavy pots filled with salt, and pulled it carefully back to the mulecart. But his mind was not on the work : it was whirling, trying to find a way out.

He had made up his mind to die with his own people, with his clan, but they had died, and he had lived. Now it seemed there was no way to die with honour, and no way to run without bringing yet more grief to people who - surely- had the right to look to him for protection. If running from Vatto on his own would be hard, unarmed and in a strange land, running with a woman and children would be impossible. And leaving them to Vatto's revenge was unthinkable - wasn't it? He thought about it, anyway but thinking about it was a different thing to doing it.

He had thought he still had a choice : to be a slave or die, even if he had lost the chance for death in war. As slavery was impossible, death was only a matter of time and opportunity. And now that choice had been taken away too.

When he got back to the mulecart with the salt, Elen was sitting next to it, with Rian and Tasulo, eating stew. Tasulo smiled at Esca, but he could not bring himself to smile back.  



	2. Winter in Deva

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esca and the other slaves arrive in Deva. Esca gets a haircut, has a very unpleasant (but gen!) time in a bathhouse, and proves difficult to sell.

Walking down the main East road towards Deva that cold and windy morning, the huge stone walls of the fortress were visible for miles, dark and heavy in the distance. As they came closer, the strength of the fortified Eastgate, busy with soldiers coming and going, was obvious. It looked even bigger than the fort he had seen at Eboracum, and that had been large enough. Around the great walls were deep-dug ditches. Esca tried to imagine how one might go about an attack on such a place, but he could not imagine how any army could go about surmounting those walls, not if they were defended.

He wondered how his father might have gone about it, and came up short - again, that flash of memory, his father's knife, his mother's throat. He wondered if Rian and Tasulo's mother had died like that - surely she had not? And he wondered if Elen wished that she had, or if she was glad that she had not. He wished again, hopelessly, that his wound had been fatal, as it should have been.

Sometimes it was easier to think like a slave, like an ox. No guilt, no loyalty: an uncertain future, an unimportant past. Nobody expecting you to do anything but keep out of trouble. Esca looked down and concentrated hard on how fortunate he was that whoever had stolen his good tunic had not also made off with his boots.

Thinking that way still gave him an uncomfortable feeling at the back of his mind, where all the things that had made him a warrior lived, growling in the dark like an injured hound, dangerous to the wrong hand. But it was easier, sometimes, to pretend for a little while that his new life was all there was.

Vatto led his group off the road before they came to the Eastgate, among the scatter of houses and farm buildings outside the walls, past lines of stone altars and gravestones lining the road approaching the gate. They stopped a little way south of the great fortress city, and set up their camp a little way from a huge round building that stood a little outside the city walls.

Esca had heard men speak of the great amphitheatre of Deva, but it was taller than he had expected, with many doors and a great flight of wooden steps leading up into it. He had never seen such a thing : not a fortress, or a dun, or a grave, but a great building full of seats for beast fights and sacrifices and games. It seemed a great deal of effort to go to. Perhaps it was necessary to build such a thing because this land was so strangely flat, with no valley sides to sit and look down on the action. Though it looked too small to host a chariot race.

That afternoon, to everyone's relief, the wind dropped and it finally stopped raining. The low sun came out from behind the clouds in the West just as they were starting to put up the tents, and outside the dark shadow of the fortress walls, the wet trees and grass shone gold. Vatto handed his horse to Esca, who fastened her at the picket line and started to remove her tack.

Vatto sniffed and wrinkled his nose, looking disapprovingly at him. "Imilco!" Vatto said. "I'm going into Deva, to the baths, then I'll be staying at the inn in Northgate street tonight, if you need me. Keep an eye on everything for me." Imilco nodded in acknowledgement.

"You can take this bunch down to the river once you've got the tents up : they could do with a wash : they stink. "

"Oh, and Imilco! That girl, Totia, the one who reckons she can cut hair? Get her to give them a trim, Roman style, let's see what she can do. She can't possibly make that one" he waved at Esca "look any worse, and if she's any good we can advertise her as skilled and put a few hundred on her price. I want them looking in good trim tomorrow."

Esca looked down at himself in surprise. He had not thought about bathing for a long while - it had not seemed important - but it was true his clothes were greasy and thick with mud. He had an awkward little beard, and his hair was still lopsided where Vatto had cut it back to expose his clipped ear.

"Oh, and Imilco? Keep them away from the houses, last time I stopped here there was a very annoying business with some silly woman who swore one of my lot had made off with her best goose, so keep an eye on them... Oh, and one last thing - careful with the razors and the scissors, remember. " Vatto shouldered his bag and walked off.

Once Vatto was safely headed towards the Eastgate and out of earshot, Imilco let out an explosive puff of breath . "Oh, and Imilco!" he exclaimed, half under his breath, hands on his hips, indignant.

" He leaves you much to do." Esca observed, starting to rub down the mare.

"He certainly does." said Imilco, sighing. " No matter! He's promised me my freedom and a partnership if the next three trade runs go well, so I'm lucky: he's a hard man, but I reckon he's a man of his word."

"I did not realise you were a slave" Esca said, surprised.

"Oh yes" said Imilco. "Slaveborn and bred, that's me. Vatto bought me in from Gaul to help run the business, he needed an assistant. " He straightened up. "And that I should be doing, not nattering here. Finish off with that horse and then come and help me with the tents."

Then he paused and turned back to Esca.

"That last, about the razors, was for you, you do know that?" he said. "Will you let little Totia tidy you up like a sensible person, or are you going to do something stupid? Because if you do, I will have Motius whip you, and the woman, and those poor kids. Vatto being off in Deva makes no difference : I have my orders. "

Esca stood very still. Somewhere at the back of his head, the son of Cunoval was overflowing with outrage all over again, at such words from a slave. Another slave, Esca told himself. He pushed his anger back, reached for his slave-self and bowed his head.

"I understand" he told Imilco.

He noticed that Imilco and a couple of the others were very much to hand, anyway, while Totia did her work and they kept Rian and Tasulo close while Totia used the razor and the scissors. Esca moved slowly and kept his hands where they could see them. It was strange to be cleanshaven in the Roman manner, with his hair clipped short, and the air cold on the back of his neck.

Vatto came back from the town the next day in high spirits. He inspected Totia's work and pronounced it acceptable, and then announced to his men that he had made arrangements for them to overwinter at Deva, since the weather was so bad this year.

Then he ordered the the mules harnessed up to the cart again, and leaving the tents and most of the slaves with Imilco, he set off with two of his men, Esca, Rian and Tasulo, through the Eastgate, to the river docks south of the town.

The docks were not busy, so late in the year, but there was one large trading ship tied up at end of the long pier that reached out into the centre of the river, swollen, brown and muddy with the autumn rain.

Esca helped Vatto's men unload the parcels of furs from the mulecart, and pass them to sailors, who stowed them on board, while Vatto had a drink and chatted with the owner of the ship in Latin. The ship owner was a tall man with sweeping Gaulish moustaches, who seemed to know Vatto well. Rian and Tasulo had been given no work to do and played along the muddy foreshore, prodding at the quivering mud with long sticks, and peering into the small fishing boats tied up by the wharf. One of them was unloading baskets of shiny black mussels and oysters, which seemed to fascinate them.

On the way back through Deva, Vatto stopped in the street outside the gates of the bath house, busy with soldiers and slaves coming and going. He sent his men on with the cart, and led Esca and the children down a narrow side-street, then entered the building through a low doorway.

Inside was a large room filled with boxes and bundles. A worried looking boy in a very clean white tunic greeted Vatto.

"I'm here to speak with Tertius" Vatto announced. The boy nodded and ran off to find him. Tertius was a thin bald man, who came rushing into the room briskly and greeted Vatto enthusiastically. He seemed like the kind of man who had great difficulty standing still : he was full of fidgets.

"Here they are" said Vatto, as if he were doing Tertius a great favour. "One man, two young ones, as we discussed. You can have the three of them for the winter, standard rate, and I'll pick them up again in the spring".

Tertius looked dubiously at Rian and Tasulo. "They are not very big" he said. "And the man is not trustworthy, you say? I see his ear is clipped."

"He needs to be kept an eye on, but you shouldn't have any trouble with him here in Deva, with the legion all around you" said Vatto, with enthusiasm. " And he's strong enough, and has been well fed, should be able to do a good deal of work. He won't give you any trouble if you take these others, as I suggested".

Tertius looked Esca up and down. "He's fit and well?"

"Take your tunic off, man" Vatto told Esca. Esca looked at him for a moment in silent incredulity, until Vatto put his hand on the whip. Esca took off his tunic.

"Good gods!" Tertius exclaimed. "A painted barbarian! Well, It's not as if I were buying him, after all: and I suppose it doesn't matter what he looks like, down in the furnace room. Very well then, one winter at standard rate: Minerva know we need the help now the weather's turned cold and everything is mud, so they are all coming in every day expecting hot water and clean towels!"

"Very well" said Vatto, pleased. "You three, behave yourselves and do what Tertius tells you. Many thanks Tertius, I'll have my man call in for the money". He left. Esca pulled his tunic back on and looked at Tertius, cautiously.

Tertius wrinked his nose at Rian and Tasulo's clothes, and sent them off with the boy who had first greeted Vatto, to get them something clean to wear . Then Tertius led Esca down the rough stone steps, down to the furnace rooms.  
...........................................

It was a hard winter for Esca. He was not unused to hard work: long days on the hunting trail or helping with the lambing were nothing new to him, but this was a different kind of work, heavy, repetitive and hot. The three great furnaces each must be kept stoked with heavy logs of beech and oak, and none of them were ever allowed to go out, except for repairs. The wood must be unloaded promptly from the carts that came in from outside the fortress and stacked in the yard, then carried in, stacked again, and finally flung into the busy furnaces.

They worked in shifts, six men including Esca. Esca had energy to do almost nothing but try to keep up with the work, and when work ended, sleep an exhausted, troubled sleep in the small, too-warm room just up the steps from the furnace rooms. He never went outside the city walls, that winter, and saw the sky only in hurried glances from the timber-yard. For the first few weeks, his muscles ached constantly and every awakening seemed darker than the last.

Sometimes he woke himself in the middle of the long nights, crying out in the dark, and came back to awareness with a confused recollection of dreams where his brothers, dressed in their best clothes and golden torcs, questioned him about why he was still alive and what on earth he thought he was doing, here in the hot dark in a room full of slaves. He tried to explain, but they turned their backs, and then a great hot wind came and blew them away along the warrior road into the West beyond the sunset like autumn leaves, leaving him alone.

He saw little of Rian and Tasulo, but he was conscious of their presence, an ongoing puzzle and a threat held over him. They had been put to work cleaning the public areas of the bathhouse, he gathered when he saw Tasulo briefly, bumping into him on his way to eat at the end of his shift.

"Rian likes it here" Tasulo informed him. "she has been helping with the women that come to bathe in during the mornings, and carrying all the strigils and oils, and they give her sweets and tell her she is pretty and should put her hair up. She says it's exciting and she wants to stay. "

"And do you like it too?" Esca asked him.

"NO! " said Tasulo. "They have these sponges on sticks that they use in the latrines, and I have to collect up all the sponges and change the vinegar! It's stinky. And Tertius beat me when I got my white tunic dirty. And the men all loll about in the water and shout for more oil and towels, while you have to run about and move all the wood downstairs. It's not fair."

"Life is never fair" said Esca, wearily. "I must go and eat now before I fall asleep here... Tell Rian that she should ask Tertius if she can stay here, they might buy her from Vatto if she is good at the work and enjoys it".

"But then I'd have to go on without her." Tasulo looked worried.

"Perhaps - though you could stay too?" Tasulo looked mutinous and shook his head. "If she has found a life here that is good, you should be glad for her, Tasulo. She might be able to save up and buy her freedom in a place like this. There are many worse things that Vatto could do with her."

And of course, if Rian was a bath slave in Deva, she could not be held as a threat over Esca's head, either. He went in to get his bowl of stew, feeling dirty and ashamed. And yet, it was true, there were many worse fates for a pretty slave child who was just about to turn ten, than becoming the pet of the ladies who came to visit a bathhouse.

...........................................

 

It seemed to take the spring a thousand years to arrive, and when at last the days began to lengthen, and the sky above the yard where the wood was stacked began to be a pale blue more often than not, and at last, Vatto came ducking under the low doorway into the slave rooms of the bathhouse, Esca almost felt pleased to see him again. Almost.

Rian got her wish, and stayed at the bathhouse. Tertius, the bathhouse manager, bought her. They waited outside the door, the three of them, while Vatto and Tertius discussed payment. Rian hugged her brother, who was sobbing.

"You will look after him, won't you?" she asked Esca.

"I will try" he replied, uncomfortable. "For as long as I can. Rian, will you be well here?"

"I shall be." she said, small face resolute. "The ladies are kind to me and I like the work... it's better than the farm! I was never so warm and cosy in winter before... But I shall miss you so much, Tasulo. Come back and see me? Or send me messages at least."

Before they left, Esca gave Rian the name of his brother's wife, and her children, and made her say them back to him, to be sure she remembered.

"If you need help, these my kinswomen were sent away to my cousins near Canovium, before the soldiers came." he said to her. "That is along the coast road from Deva, on the way to Segontium, up in the mountains, nobody will come looking there. If you need it, go to them and ask for help in my name."

He cast around in his mind. Such a message should come with a sign, a ring or a brooch to show the messenger's good faith, but he had nothing of the sort to give Rian. "Tell them... tell my sister Tesni that I ask it by the otter that my brother and I raised. She will remember that."

 

Vatto was so pleased with the price he had got for Rian, that he stopped with Esca and Tasulo on their way out of the city, and bought them both clothes to replace the old ones that Esca had worn all the winter long, and the clothes that Tasulo had been given back when he took off his white bath-house tunic, which were now really too small.

Then Vatto took them to a shed near the amphitheatre, where a square looking man with familiar swirling tattoos on his arms was looking over some heavy-built yellow mastiff dogs, with thick necks and huge jaws.

He turned away from the dogs to greet Vatto. "So this is your mac Cunoval, is it?" he asked, looking Esca over. He seemed unimpressed. "He doesn't look like much. He's too small".

"No! he's agile" Vatto argued. "He'd do well in the arena, and he's painted all right under that tunic. Esca..." he gestured.

Not again, thought Esca. He felt so tired that it did not seem worth the arguing, and as Vatto looked meaningfully at him, he put his hands to his belt, ready to take his tunic off again. Perhaps in the arena there would be the chance to die fighting at least. Tasulo was looking at him, worried eyes wide.

"Hah! that's no good" said the tattooed man. He was certainly from one of the Brigantes clans, Esca thought, from the East coast, from his accent. "I've tattoos aplenty myself but nobody's going to pay to see me in the arena. I bought a couple of good Germans yesterday, I've no use for this one. He looks worked out to me, no fire left in his belly. Nobody's going to pay to see him just for the name of some dead chieftain who sired him. Maybe. "

That was too much to bear.

"Roman cur!" Esca spat at him. "How much do they pay you to buy and sell your own people for silver?" He would have hit the man then, if Vatto had not shoved in front of him . Two other men who had been looking at the mastiffs turned hurriedly and started towards them, heavy sticks in their hands. Esca froze.

"That's more like it" said the tattooed man, thoughtfully. "But still not really good enough. I just don't need him at the moment Vatto. "

"Very well then" said Vatto, briskly now "We'll do business another time, perhaps. Good to speak with you."

"Good" he said to Esca as they walked back through Deva, afterwards. " He wanted to see a little fire, and you showed him that. Perhaps I should have tried him in the autumn, but I had the word that he wasn't buying until the spring... No matter. "

If Tasulo had not been with them then, Esca would have tried to kill Vatto then, there on the busy street, even unarmed as he was. He would have killed the man for praising his loss of control, for daring to believe Esca's pride and anger was obedience. He thought breaking Vatto's neck would be possible, if it was done quickly.

But Tasulo was there between them, and Esca had heard that any slave that witnessed the violent death of his master would be put to the torture.

He put a leash on the anger of Cunoval's son, and pulled him to the back of his mind, snarling.


	3. Watling Street

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esca is taken still further South, discusses the nature of slavery and commissions a song.

The thin spring sunshine was warm on Esca's back, and the leaves were just coming in, brilliant green on the willow bushes along the river. It was good to be outside again, away from the endless roar of the greedy furnaces and the bustling, enclosed life of the bathhouse.

He had felt so very tired, when they had left the amphitheatre, after the Corieltauvi trader Vatto had tried to sell him to fight in the arena at Deva, but as they left the dark city walls behind, the tiredness seemed to drop away a little. When they came to the river, Vatto permitted him to stop and splash his face in the clear, cold water and for a minute or so, it felt almost like freedom.

Vatto's laden mules, with his slave deputy, Imilco, and the Corieltauvi's other men, were waiting for them by the side of the busy Roman road, as Vatto, Esca, and Tasulo crossed the river by the wooden bridge south of Deva. There were two mulecarts now, piled high with covered parcels and packets. Vatto had clearly been busy that winter.

Only a few of the slaves that had walked with them to Deva were there: instead there were long-haired Deciangli, dressed in the long dark woollen coats and stout sheepskin boots of their tribe, and talking among themselves in the harsh accents of the northern peoples of the Cymru.

Elen was sitting on the riverbank beside Banno, and looking at her as they approached, Esca thought that she looked thin and tired.

Last summer, in a time that seemed a thousand years ago now, he and his brothers had teased Elen that she was as round and sweet and golden brown as one of the little round whortleberry cakes that she cooked on her round bakestone at the edge of the fire. Her round dumpling curves made a contrast with her dear friend Tesni, Esca's brother's tall, slender dark-haired wife.

But now Elen's apple cheeks were sharp-edged and there were grey smudges under her tired brown eyes. The little bee-slave Banno, on the other hand, looked cheerful and perhaps a little fatter than before, his face crinkling cheerfully as he saw them coming.

Tasulo ran to greet them like old friends.

"What did you do over the winter? We were in a bath house! The floors were all hot all winter and I had to wear sandals and a white tunic but I've got this new one now and it's much better, look!"

"Very fine! " Banno said to him, smiling. "We were making baskets and skeps all winter long. Easy enough work when you are used to it".

"And where is Rian?" Elen asked Tasulo, looking around. The boy went quiet and looked away.

"The bathhouse bought her", Esca replied for him. "She seemed to like it there, I think she will be well, but it was a sad parting for the two of them, when it was time for her brother to say goodbye to her. Elen, are things... how is it with you?"

"It could be worse : I know how to make baskets from willow now" she said "Banno was very kind and showed me what to do, though I am still not as quick as he is. And you?" she asked Esca, looking him up and down, her tired face looking worried. "You look terrible! "

Her concern was unexpected, but it warmed him. "Oh well, hard work in the winter is a sad change from lazing by the fire, as I used to do" he said, trying to make a joke of it and match her courage. He had never been one for sitting still.

It was a dry spring that year, with days of bright sun and little clouds moving across blue skies, and that made the walking seem pleasant on the way south from Deva. There were so many riders and fast chariots on the road between Deva, the City of Legions and Viriconium of the Cornovii that Esca and the other slaves did not walk along the road itself, but alongside it, on the grass nibbled short by the black, longhorned cattle that grazed the meadows along the banks of the winding young river Dee. The mule carts were no faster this year than they had been in the autumn, but at least it was not so muddy.

Vatto called the halt early that first evening, when the sun was still well up in the sky. Once they had pitched the tents on a small hummock of grassy land between the road and the river, they carried that evening's firewood down to the river and set up their campfire by the water's edge. Most of the slaves, and Vatto's men too, stripped off to splash or even swim in the chill, shadowy brown depths, glinting with golden specks in the light of the westering sun.

When Esca came out of the river, gasping a little at the cold and grabbing for his tunic, he noticed Imilco, Vatto's assistant, staring across the riverbank at Tasulo and Elen, who were both still naked and splashing each other as if both of them were Tasulo's age. Imilco's eyes were wide and he had a hungry look about him. Esca's heart sank. He scooped up Elen and Tasulo's clothes and took them over to interrupt the game.  
.............................  
If Deva was a city-fortress, Viriconium was a true city, with wide straight streets of huge houses built of red Roman brick and yellow sandstone, and shops selling all sorts of strange things - shiny red samian-ware pottery, strong-smelling spices, bright silks, mirrors, elaborately decorated sandals, close-woven woollen rugs and great bowls of green and black olives from the distant South.

It was a clean, new place, as though the city had sprouted up all at once like a mushroom bursting from the flat green land, with the road running straight as an arrow right through the middle of the tall houses, past the forum and the huge bathhouse.

"Are these people all Romans?" Tasulo asked Esca, staring at a couple who were looking at bowls at the pottery shop. The portly man was wearing a toga, and the woman had her hair in elaborate curls. "That man's wearing a blanket!"

"I don't know. " Esca admitted. "I thought Viriconium was the city of the Cornovii, but these people look Roman... I think that blanket is called a toga, I saw some men wearing them when I went to Eboracum once. My father" he stumbled on the word, and started again more carefully.

" I was told it signifies that they are too important to ride a horse or something like that. I would not wish to ride wearing one, would you? I think they did not wear them often in Deva, though you would know better than me about that. Perhaps they are not clothes for soldiers."

"They are not" said Imilco. "They are for Roman citizens - for people engaged in public affairs. That man might be a magistrate, perhaps".

Imilco was walking near enough to overhear, because he had taken to leading his mule as near to where Elen was walking as he could easily get. Elen usually walked with Esca, Tasulo and Banno together, making a little group of the four Brigantes who had come down from Calacum and had not been sold in Deva.

Since Imilco had begun doing this, Esca had taken to walking between Imilco and Elen, when he and Elen could manage it. Imilco's interest was not welcome to her, though at least he did not seem to have any desire to force her. Esca was thankful that at least it was Imilco who followed, looking like a lovesick sheep, rather than Vatto. He suspected Vatto would have no qualms about taking a slave woman that he fancied, whether she wished it or not.  
...........................................  
They did not stop for long in Viriconium. Vatto took the great trade route that ran South and East across the heart of the land, down towards Londinium.

One morning as they walked east, Banno gathered an armful of reeds from the edge of a small stream which ran beside the road. He tied them into a bundle and slung them over his shoulder. As they walked, he whistled tunelessly as he stripped out the pith and began to weave the dark green husks together.

"What are you making?" Elen asked him.

"Thought I'd make myself a hat!" he said, smiling at her. "It's just like weaving skeps for the bees, but smaller and you put a brim on it. And these reeds are not as hard on the fingers as that willow we had in Deva... Want me to make you one?"

"I'll see what it looks like, first." she said.

Banno laughed "it will be a thing of beauty!" he said. " Wait till you see it! I make wonderful hats, they keep the rain off your neck and the sun out of your eyes!"

Esca looked at him. For a man who had been born a slave, had lost the only home he had ever known, and was walking into an uncertain future, it seemed very strange that Banno was such a happy man.

"Banno, how do you stay so full of cheer despite all this? " Esca gestured around at the carts, the mules, Imilco behind them and Vatto on his horse at the front of the group. "You still have a smile."

Banno looked at him, face for once thoughtful and serious. He began to speak, then paused, staring at the reeds in his hands, searching for words.

"I ... Being a slave, it's not easy." He paused " Well, of course, it's not easy, living your life by another man's whim. Nobody loves..." he waved a hand full of reeds helplessly "... being poor. Not ... having a voice. Always being in the wrong. Being beaten. All of it. "

" I'm not a fighter, not like you. You know, I had a friend, you probably don't remember him, he was one of your father's cowherds. When the men with swords came to take us slaves, he went for them with a pitchfork. I don't know why: it was all over by that time anyway. They laughed at him as they cut him down. He didn't even get close enough to touch them, and they killed him and laughed."

There was a long pause. Banno was frowning, deep in thought as he walked along, but his fingers were still busy, weaving the reeds into a shape like a small bowl. After a while, he spoke again.

"What I reckon is ... these are the dice I've rolled. I have to work with what I've got. Like these reeds. Straw would make a better hat, but I don't have any straw. " He frowned, thinking.

"So... I can't change my roll of the dice. I could eat myself up inside, all panicky fear and hate, like a wild hare does if you keep her in a box. People do that, they die or go bitter as willowbark and rotten inside: I've known a few go that way. " He looked up at Esca, for a moment, eyes level.

" But to my mind... to my mind that doesn't answer. So I ...I try to float along on the river that carries me along, and accept where she takes me. And if I can, I help those I bump into along the way, just a little, and hope that they will help me."

"And one day, maybe, I'll get to roll the dice again. Perhaps this time, the gods will smile back at me."

His face relaxed and he smiled again. " And if they do, then I shall have a fine house on the South side of a hill, and a good big jug of mead and a flock of sheep, and a woman who can cook roast lamb, with a nice fat arse on her. A man can always hope!"

Esca walked on, troubled. Banno's thoughts called out to a part of him, the part of him that had been lost and bewildered since he had lost his lord, who was his father Cunoval, and his elder brothers, and had been pitched alone into this world of confusion where there seemed to be no right path to walk.

To accept that there was no right path, to accept that it was his fate to be flung about like a feather in the breeze, with no guilt or duty - he did not think he could do it. Surely there must be more shape to the world than that.

After several more days of walking, they came to Venonae: the heart of Britannia it was called, or so Imilco said, though why it should be the heart more than any other place, Esca could not see at all.

Two busy roads crossed there. One was the road that they had walked from Viriconium, which led on eventually, so Imilco said, to Londinium and the coast. The other road ran crossways across the flat and boggy pastures of Corieltauvi country, north and east towards Lindum and south and west to distant Isca Dumnoniorum.

There was a fort there, at the crossroads. Of course there was. There were forts everywhere, all of them straight edged grids of buildings with strong, fortified walls, and soldiers everywhere too, in ones and twos or tens, hundreds or even thousands. Sometimes Esca wondered if even his father could have had any idea of the strength and iron fisted power of Rome. He had certainly had had no idea. Rome was mightier than Cunoval's youngest son could have imagined, just last year, before everything changed.

That evening they stopped by Tripontium, the town of the three bridges. Vatto had heard the word in the town that there was something wrong with the water, and so he had bought a cask of sour barley beer for them to drink.

That was the evening the singer came to their fire, just as the blue sky was deepening and the stars were coming out. There were always bards on the roads, moving from place to place to collect new songs and remember old ones, stopping here or there for a day, or for a season. There had been some fine singers over the years who had come to Cunoval's dun and Cunoval had welcomed them with generous gifts and hospitality, for the songs and news they brought with them.

The slaves camped by the road by Tripontium's third bridge had little to give the man, and it seemed strange to Esca that a man of such skill had chosen their fire to stop at, when he could have pressed on into the town. But they shared their food and beer, such as it was, and thanked him eagerly for choosing to bring his songs to their fire that night.

He was a man of the South, from Gaul, that singer, and he did not only carry the songs in his head, but he carried a lyre on his back as well, to play while he sang. It was a custom in his country, he told them as he tuned the strings, for a man to play the songs as well as to sing them.

First he sang them a sea-song that came, he said, from the sailors who travel the Narrow Sea. That song was new to them all, but it was a catchy thing with a merry chorus and before long they were all joining in - well, all but Banno. "I have a cloth ear" the bee-slave said, ruefully. " I shall listen to you all singing instead, but I will put you all off if I sing too!"

After that, three of the Deciangli sang for the bard : deep and sonorous, a sheepshearing song from their homeland in the mountains, and he thanked them gravely and made a dance around their words with his lyre as he learned the new phrases.

Then he sang alone, to a tune that they had all heard before, a spring song, a song that you sing when it is time to plant the oats and barley, to help the life spring from the seed. It was a song of the death of the hero and the hero reborn, bringing hope to his people, but the words the man sang, picking at his little wooden lyre, were a little different from the ones that Esca knew, and they caught at his heart:

"Out of the mists, back from the land of youth, strong with the sound of trumpets under the apple boughs" it ended. Afterwards there was a little moment of silence before anyone spoke their praise.

He sang well for his meal that night, and seemed not to begrudge the small reward he got from Vatto for the work. After a while the Deciangli began to join in, and a while after that, they did not seem to need the lyre to help them on.

Esca found himself sitting next to the singer, as they listened. The man pointed to the blue designs on Esca's bare arm. "Now, what is the meaning of that painting?" he asked. "Surely that is the mark of a warrior? Were you taken in war?"

It should have seemed a rude question from a stranger, but somehow the beer and the singing and the firelight and the spring stars overhead had brought down Esca's guard a little, and he found himself telling the man a little, and then a little more.

About the chariot charge where his brother had gone down with a Roman spear in his stomach, and his mother's death at his father's hand. About his father and his other brother, and how the darkness had fallen on him suddenly as he ran to help them, and he had thought that it was the end.

"That is a mighty tale" the singer said "a tale that could be a song, I think, the fall of the warrior Cunoval and his clan."

"Not one that Rome would wish to be heard." said Esca, bitterly.

"Perhaps. " the singer said, thoughtfully, running a thumbnail across the strings of the lyre. "I have been to Rome. Romans love tales of enemies brave in defeat, and also, there are many others who would hear such a song and it would lift up their hearts. Would it please you if I made such a song?"

Esca thought for a while, staring into the fire. It was a generous offer, and he had nothing to give the man in return. Such a task should be rewarded with an open hand, but he had no way to do that.

He met the singer's eyes. "I have no jewel to give in return for the making of such a song." he admitted. Indeed, he might never hear the song even if it were made : Vatto would move on the next day, and Esca had no idea where he might be taken next, or how long he would stay there. But that wasn't the most important thing.

"No matter" said the bard. "I will make the song because it pleases me to make it, and because I have a tune in my head that has been waiting for the right story to tell for over a year now. "

"I would be pleased then" said Esca, a little stiffly, looking away into the fire.  
It was an odd conversation for a singer to be having with a slave, but it did not seem that way, at the time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea if people from North Wales really wore long coats and sheepskin boots, or if they sang. But there seemed no reason for them not to.
> 
> Elen's whortleberry cakes, in my head, are a very early version of the welshcake. One warning : I have made cakes with whortleberries, which are like small wild British blueberries. The flavour is excellent, but they turn the cake a disturbing grey! So I think Elen might use dried whortleberries to get cakes that come out golden brown. Or possibly she has some other trick that I have yet to discover.
> 
> The last line of the song is from 'Sword at Sunset'. I really wanted to put in a scene with a harper and that song, just because I love the scene with Artos meeting Bedwyr for the first time, so much. But when I checked, I found that the only British instruments that I could find evidence of in Britain in the second century were trumpets and horns. Harps become a huge part of the tradition, but they seem to be later. So, the obvious thing to do was to have the singer come up from Gaul with a lyre (which they certainly had, and may be the ancestor of the later British harp and crwth. )
> 
> The road that Vatto takes from Deva to Londinium (and beyond to Canterbury) is one of the big trade routes of Britain, and was later called Watling Street, hence the name of this chapter. Nowadays, with a startling lack of poetry, we call it the A5.


	4. Golden apples and the ending of the road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esca tastes the golden apples of the Cantiaci, loses some friends and finds one again, and is finally sold.

In Londinium, Vatto quickly sold most of the Decangli slaves that he had bought in Deva, and most of his other trade goods too, in exchange for heavy silver coins that he kept in a locked chest in the corner of his warehouse on the outskirts of Londinium. The city seemed to be a place that he visited regularly.   
He tried to sell Esca too , first as a gladiator, then as a stablehand, but could not find a buyer willing to offer the price he wanted. There was not much of a market for gladiators that summer, or so Vatto muttered to himself, running his hand angrily through his thin red hair. And Esca's tattoos and clipped ear - and perhaps also the unsettling way he met the potential buyer's eyes - put off the buyers of potential stableboys. Nobody, of course, would be fool enough to buy a painted warrior with a clipped ear as a house-slave: that would be far too risky.

That gave Esca a troubled feeling: he was glad that he was still a threat, not a safe, domestic beast to serve and be ignored. But the wild beast was what the arena might want one day, and he had seen enough of that by now to know that he did not want that either.

One day after they had been in Londinium for a while, Vatto sold Banno, Cunoval's bee-slave, who had walked with them so far, down from the North. Esca was not there to see him go. Vatto had sent him off with Saco and Tasulo, to help with unloading heavy bolts of woollen cloth from one of the mulecarts, and by the time they got back, Banno had already been taken away by his new master. It was strange, how much Esca missed him. The little man was, after all someone whose name he had barely known, in his old life, someone who had refused to help him escape, yet on the long walk South, he had somehow or other become a friend.

There was no talk of selling Elen, although Esca was almost sure by now that Vatto's threat of punishing her if Esca disobeyed had been forgotten. She was set the daily task of buying food for whichever slaves Vatto had with him that day, but she was given no other work, and her cheeks began to become a little round again.

One of Imilco's tasks was to help Vatto keep the books and give Elen the money for the daily ration. Esca was worried at first that he would bother Elen, but she seemed to have decided that Imilco was no threat to her : or at least, when Esca saw them together, she did not seem to be trying to avoid him, and she had given up her habit of asking Esca to walk with her to keep him away.

....................................................

That summer, Vatto spent his time between Dubris on the South Coast, his home town of Ratae Coritanorum and Londinium, buying and selling other goods than men.

Tasulo had hoped that he would take them with him to see the sea and the harbour town of Dubris, but Vatto decided that while he was buying in silks and spices, he would rent out his slaves, apart from his assistant Imilco, to a group of farms in the lands of the Cantiaci, who were hiring help with the fruit harvest.

On his way to Dubris, Vatto stopped at an inn along the road, where he was meeting a man to discuss the purchase of a quantity of honey. Imilco was given the task of taking the other slaves out to the orchards where they would be working for the rest of the summer.

Although a gentle rain was falling as they left the road and took a grassy track across the open meadows, it was warm and not unpleasant walking. It had not rained for some weeks, and the air was filled with the scent of warm, wet earth.

Imilco did not press them to hurry. Since the others were walking, he led his mule and walked with them. The straight track led across open fields for a while, then turned and went under the trees into the orchardlands of the Cantiaci: endless rows of widely spaced green-domed trees, perhaps three times the height of a man.

Just before they passed into the trees, a hare crossed their path, bright eyed, long legged, and leisurely. She cocked her angular head and looked at them for a moment before loping into the long grass.

"Luck!" said Tasulo, grinning. "Make a wish!"

The Brigantes had no tales of wishing on hares that Esca had ever heard, unless they were about wishing the dratted things had fewer fiddly little bones in them, but someone or other had told Tasulo on the road south that hares were lucky, and since then he had been looking out for them.

The trees around them were laden down with fruit and some of their branches hung almost to the green turf, nibbled short by scattered sheep.

"What are these huge apples?" Elen said. She reached out and caught hold of a cluster of three golden-russetted apples, each one almost big enough to fill her hand.

" Have you not seen the Roman apples before?" Imilco asked her, smiling at her hopefully. He was like a little dog wagging, eager to please, Esca thought. "They are like the little apples you have in the North, but they are so sweet you can eat them without cooking them or adding honey."

Elen looked dubious "You can eat them off the tree? Are you making a joke to see me pucker my mouth up when I bite one?"

"No" said Imilco laughing "See, I'll eat one first, then you can see they are safe."

He pulled one down and bit into it, smiling, then offered another to Elen. After that, they all had to try one. The apples were indeed sweet, though they still had an apple taste, and a scent that was stronger and sweeter than the smell of crabapples.

It was a busy time, the apple-harvest, but not an unpleasant one. It was good when they were able to work in the shade of the trees, for the country of the Cantiaci was warmer than the Brigantes were accustomed to, and it was a good thing that Banno had made hats for all of them on the road South, or when they came out of the orchards to load the carts and carry more apples to feed the cider press, they would have been badly burned by the fierce sun.

They saw Imilco often, for he usually stopped by when Vatto was going down to Dubris to buy spices. He came, supposedly, to carry messages to the farmer about the apple crop, part of which Vatto was taking to sell in Londinium in part-payment for his slaves' work on the harvest, but Esca thought there was no question about the real reason that he came so often.

One evening when Imilco was leaving to go back to Dubris, Elen walked with him as far as the orchard-gate. When she came back, she was smiling, and her eyes were very bright.

"He asked Vatto if he can buy me, and he said yes." she told Esca. "He's going to take me to live with him in Londinium - to see about the cooking for Vatto, to start with, but Imico says next year he may be able to buy us a little house. "

"Elen, do you want this? " Esca asked her, troubled.

She looked at him thoughtfully, and her eyes grew a little less bright as she saw his face. She sighed.

"Yes. Yes, I do want it. Oh, Esca... I shall not forget my husband Cadwgan, or my little boy - how could I? I have made the offerings for them..." her voice broke a little "I will not forget them. But, Esca, Cadwgan is almost a year dead, and I am alive. I cannot spend the rest of my life in mourning. Imilco is a good man, a kind man. "

"And a slave, and a trader in men." Esca said, bitterly.

"A slave like us" she said, and her mouth hardened a little.

"He would have whipped you, and the children too, in Deva" Esca said, remembering.

"And did no man at home ever beat his wife? Or his slaves? But Imilco will not beat me now, I think." Elen looked down at the grass for a moment, then looked Esca in the eye, determined.

"Esca, a year ago, I would have sworn that I would die before I would go with a slave, and die before I agreed to live out my life in these muddy lowlands far from home. But now... Death in defeat is for the great lady of the clan, as your mother died. Escape to life as an honoured exile is for - for people like Tesni, your brother's wife. We were friends I know, but she was always the lady, not me. I am just a woman and I must live as I can and take joy where I may."

"Imilco is a good man. He's not like Motius and Saco and the others... And I think he will not be a slave for long, and then he will marry me, and we will both be free and we will make a life together. I will keep his house and bear his children and they will be born free."

"Please. It would mean much to me if you would wish us joy now? "

Esca's heart was heavy. But after all, if there was a choice here at all, it was Elen's choice to make, not his.

...................................................

When the apple harvest was done and the leaves on the apple-trees were starting to turn yellow and gold around the edges, Vatto rented out Esca and Tasulo to work in the Roman military stables on the outskirts of Londinium. The stables served the messengers and soldiers of Rome, providing replacement mounts for those who came with written authorisations to travel swiftly, and stabling for those who had business in Londinium.

Vatto himself was travelling North with Imilco and Elen, to spend the winter in his home at Ratae Corieltauvorum. He would return and collect his surplus slaves in the spring when the roads were better, Imilco told them.

Esca had thought that the stables would be easier at least than the work of stoking the bathhouse furnaces in Deva, and to begin with, it was. The work was not so hot and heavy as the furnace work had been, and cleaning tack, feeding and exercising the horses was more the kind of task that he had been used to in his old life, though as he said ruefully to Tasulo, he had never spent so much time shovelling such quantities of dung before.

But at least even shovelling dung could be done in company, and through the last warm days of that flybitten Southern autumn, they walked the horses in relays down to the river to drink and swim, and picked the last of the blackberries and hazelnuts from the hedges to eat on the way back, until Tasulo's tunic and hands were stained and sticky with juice, and it felt almost to Esca like a life that he could bear, if he did not think too hard, and if he ignored his dreams.

But later, as the winter drew on it was harder to work in the stables than it had been to mindlessly stoke the furnaces, though it was hard in a different way. Rome looked on her courier horses as supplies, like grain and lead and slaves. The horses must be ready at any moment when a messenger came in for a change of mount, and must be ridden swiftly and without trouble by any rider with authorisation.

If they proved hard to handle, well, there were tools to force the horse into line that were quicker and easier than working gently with the animal, as Esca would have done, until the horse consented to do as he was bid. And if the horse was spoiled by harsh treatment, well, he could be sold or sent to the knackers : there were always new beasts coming in.

Some of the riders were very harsh with their mounts - not all of them, not even most of them, but enough.

Seeing it put a bad taste in Esca's mouth, and there was nothing to be done about it. He was not even allowed to speak to the riders about the state of the horses, not after the first time, when he almost came to blows with one of Rome's messengers. He was beaten for that, and once he could walk again, restricted to dung-shovelling, until the busy stable manager forgot what he had done, and needed another man to help exercise the horses again.

If a messenger came in with a horse whipped almost to foundering, all he could do was take the foaming, shaking animal away, and bring another. His heart ached at the cruelty and the waste, and as the days lengthened again and the winter wore into a wild and windy spring, Esca became silent and withdrawn and avoided the company of the other slaves, even Tasulo.

Esca had expected Vatto to come for them in the springtime as he had done before in Deva, but he did not. He had no idea whether the stablemaster had heard from Vatto and had agreed to keep them for longer, or if he had bought them, or if they had simply been forgotten: nobody told them, and after the beating, Esca was disinclined to ask.   
................................

One early morning in June, Esca and Tasulo were turning out four ponies into one of the more distant fields that had not yet been grazed out that summer, when they heard a tuneless whistling coming from the other side of a thick hedge. It sounded somehow familiar. Then they saw the crest of a distinctive reed hat, just visible over the hawthorn.

"Banno!" Tasulo yelled, happily, and a familiar face peeped over the hedge at them.

It was good to see Banno again. His new master's farm was just up the valley, and he had come down to set up some new hives at the south end of the farm that morning : Esca and Tasulo had passed the road down to that farm a number of times, and Banno had walked past the stables, but they had not seen each other until then. After that, Banno walked over to the stables in the early evenings to see them, sometimes, when he was able to take a little time away from the bees.

................................

It was a dry summer that year, until the autumn came. Then the rain came down, too much all at once, like a thick grey curtain, pouring, great heavy drops falling from a swollen, greyish-purple sky for days on end. The land was dry and hard, and the rain ran off it in sheets.

The Tamesis rolled full and brown and turbulent in the wide, shallow valley below the stable blocks, and when the tide came up, she broke her banks, filling the lowlying fields with water a foot or more deep, so that where the river bed lay was impossible to tell: fields and meadows and the lower roads made one great wide lake, over which great flocks of ducks paddled. Trees, bushes and in places, buildings too, rose from the water, showing where in more normal times, field boundaries and woodland and the edges of the town lay, and through the centre of the waters of the wide lake, the hungry main current of the Tamesis roared, swift and deadly.

The water carried things off, too: small boats and coracles at first, not pulled up far enough from the greedy river's banks, then as the river rose and rose, hurdles, baskets, beehives, and the contents of any house or barn that stood a little too low and vulnerable to the brown water, seized and hurried down the river through the city towards the sea.

They ran short of grazing for the horses, and had to bring the animals in early. That made for a good deal of extra work, feeding and exercising and mucking out beasts that would normally have been turned out.

Perhaps that was why Tasulo became impatient with the work, towards the end of one long busy day, and stole away to look at the flotsam borne on the floodwaters, or perhaps he simply strayed too close to the brown flood. Esca did not see him fall. But when the shout went up and he looked at the river, he saw Tasulo carried past, not far away, but too far - almost as fast as a man can run.

Esca grabbed the nearest pony and leapt on her - thankfully she already had a bridle on - and urged her on towards the river. He could see Tasulo's head, still above the brown tide, and his arms moving, trying to keep himself afloat. Esca muttered a quick prayer to the lady Tamesis as he rode, though he did not think she was in any mood to be helpful, just then.

The pony baulked at the roaring of the river, and Esca flung himself off her back, knee deep into the muddy shallows that had once been a field. He looked again, trying to see Tasulo's head above the choppy waters. Esca had taken the pony downstream a little as he rode, so Tasulo should be coming past him at any moment. The light was already going under the heavy grey clouds, and it was hard to see now that he was down on a level with the water, but Esca thought he saw Tasulo again for a moment, lifting one arm out of the water to wave. Esca turned to dive in to the water after him, but a hand grabbed his arm. It was one of the Roman messenger riders: he must have followed him down from the stables.

"What are you doing man?" the messenger half-shouted, voice raised above the roar of the river. "He's gone, there's no way you'll find him in that." he waved his other hand at the roaring Tamesis. Esca tried to pull away, but now the man was holding him with both hands, and he could not get loose.

And now, as they struggled, his chance was vanishing : Tasulo must be downstream of them by now, and there was little hope of finding him. A tree came past, carried by the water, still with most of its leaves on, and they both had to struggle backwards in the shallow water to avoid being hit by the branches.

Esca turned on the Roman then, with all the fury of two years restraint unleashed. He was unarmed and the Roman had a sword on his belt, but Esca did not give him a chance to draw it: he smashed the man's long Roman nose first, then punched him in the stomach, a blow that would have felled him, if he had not happened to be wearing a thick sheepskin jacket.

The Roman tried to come back against him with a blow to the head, but Esca ducked under it and kicked him in the thigh, and the man fell heavily with a splash into the brown water.

Esca turned back to the river, searching but it was too late. He could see no sign of anyone in the river. Tasulo was lost. He had failed in his promise to Rian, his sister, and now there was nothing left. And now, men were coming, running from the stables, too many to fight, and some of them men he had worked side by side with all this year. He allowed them to grab him and hurry him back to the stable block.

Looking back over his shoulder as they pulled him away, Esca saw that the Roman that he had knocked down had not been not carried away by the river. It seemed most unfair. The man struggled back to his feet, muddy and streaming river-water and the people running down from the stables had picked him up out of the edge of the flood, and helped him back onto dry land, bringing a broken nose and a foul temper with him.

For Esca, it was like going back two years. They flung him into an empty stall and padlocked the door closed, and he sank down, soaked and miserable, cursing himself, and the Roman, and Tasulo for not being more careful, and the bloody Tamesis too.

The next three days were long and bitterly empty and cold. They brought him bread and water in the mornings, but nothing else, and by the end of the third day he was very hungry as well as cold.

When the dark came down again that day, another echo of the past came to trouble him. Banno came, scratching at the door and calling out to him quietly. The door was padlocked of course, but the stable block was not new, and there was a cracked place where the door had been kicked by a horse. Banno had brought him a jug of broth, a bag of honey-cakes and a dry blanket, and they managed to get all of them through the gap, with a little difficulty.

Esca thanked him honestly before he ate. It was not, after all, Banno's task, to bring food and comfort to a rebellious slave that was not even part of his own master's household. There was no question in Esca's mind that it was a generous act and a brave one too. Banno had no special permission to come to the stable, and to get there he had walked alone through the dark from his master's farm, across open country where there might be wolves roaming.

"Are you going back tonight?" Esca asked him. "It would be safer to wait till the morning".

"Yes" said Banno "I will do that. I've had a word with Cocca in the kitchens here - she warmed up that broth for me, such a nice girl - and she says she'll let me bed down in the scullery tonight. I'll get off back tomorrow first thing before anyone notices I'm gone. "

"I'm glad" said Esca " I would not want you in a wolf's belly, just to bring me honey cakes. Not that they are not very welcome" he added taking a big bite.

"I've brought... something else as well" said Banno, from where he was sitting outside the stable door. He sounded troubled. "It's this - careful, it's sharp".

He slipped something under the door that chinked as it touched the metal of the hinge. Esca put out his hand carefully to feel what it was - it was very dark in the stable, and Banno had put his lantern out, so as not to attract attention - and felt, under his fingers, a slim cold blade and a hard bone handle.

"A knife?" Esca picked it up and felt the blade, carefully.

"Yes" said Banno, sounding worried. "I - I've had that with me for a long time now, and I'd been meaning to give it to you before, honestly. I never meant to keep it. I'd have given it to you in Londinium, only you weren't there when Vatto sold me, and then it was too late. "

"Banno, what do you mean? Why did you mean to give it to me? I asked you for a knife, once before, two years ago, and you said no." Esca said.

" I... I was worried you'd use it on someone and get yourself killed." Banno said, in a rush, falling over his words. "It's your father's knife. "

"My father's knife? It does feel the same shape... I can't see it in here" Esca said, wondering. "How did you come to have my father's knife, Banno?"

"Gwen gave it to me, to give to you, when she was sold - she had it from one of your father's fighting men, I don't know who. She didn't want to leave it with you in case it was stolen while you were ill. "

"Thank you" Esca said. He ran his finger down the side of the blade, remembering. There was a long pause.

"Sir ... if they find it on you, if you kill Vatto when he comes for you, they'll know it was me that gave it to you." Banno said, hesitating. "There are people who know I'm here tonight, even if they are looking the other way. They would know where the knife came from."

"So why did you bring it, after all this time?" Esca asked him, curious. " You could have thrown it in the river: nobody would ever have known."

"I would have known." Banno said, obstinately. There was no trace of the usual smile in his voice.

"And .." his voice was very quiet, "my lord, they are saying that you will go to the arena, now, no matter what the price. It might not even be to fight. They might give you to to the wild beasts to be torn apart. "

"So, I may need a knife" said Esca, and suddenly his heart was light, and he flung the knife in the air and caught it by the handle in the dark as it came down again, because at last, at last an ending was coming. No more choices. No more duties.

"Thank you Banno" he said again, and meant it with all his heart.   
....................................................

 

Vatto was not best pleased to be called away from business in Londinium by a peremptory military message to come and deal with his troublesome slave, but the message was very clear. They expected him to come and take the problem off their hands right away, or this would be the last slave he rented to them.

Vatto had been planning a trip West to Glevum anyway, and perhaps this was the moment for it. He would call in to the military stables on the way and pick the man up, though it looked sadly as though he was not going to make much of a profit on him, after all.   
......................................................

 

It was like the road south from Calacum again, for Esca. The same cold iron ring back around his neck, pulling his head forward, the same mulecart, jerking him forward unexpectedly if the mules decided, as mules sometimes will, to pull forward energetically, just for the sake of it. But the only other slaves in the party this time were Motius and Saco, who had been brought along to guard the consignment of precious cloves, ginger and cinnamon loaded onto the cart.

Esca was not expected to help with the loading. They left him chained to the cart-tail, and ignored him, mostly, though Vatto had ordered that he was to be fed the same food that Motius and Saco were allowed to buy for themselves, which after days of bread and water was a relief. Esca wondered if Elen knew what had happened to Tasulo, and could not decide if he thought it was better if she did not. It was strange and hard to think that the boy was gone, so finally and without a word.

The first town along their route that had an arena was Calleva, and there Vatto bound Esca's hands behind his back before he released the chain from the mulecart, and had Motius hold the chain while they walked over to see the slavemaster there, a man named Beppo.

...........................................

Vatto had already made up his mind that he would turn Esca into cash in Calleva, even if he had to take a loss on the man, he was too much of a risk to keep with him any longer. Perhaps he had made a mistake buying him. Hairdressers, scribes and bee-slaves were so much easier. But, such are the risks a man of business must take. Having come to this conclusion, the Corieltauvi slavetrader was somewhat surprised by Beppo's response to his sales pitch.

When Vatto spoke about Esca's capture and mentioned the name of Cunoval, Beppo looked genuinely interested. He inspected Esca's tattoos with more than a show of interest, and nodded sagely. They'd cut his tunic to look at them, as Vatto didn't fancy untying the man's wrists while he was not chained to something solid. Not after what Esca had done to a fully armed soldier a good ten years younger than Vatto.

Beppo seemed impressed by that story, too. The price he first offered was more than Vatto had been expecting, and Vatto was so taken aback, that for a moment, he almost forgot to haggle. Only for a moment, of course. In the end, he was well pleased with the price Beppo gave him. As his most awkward purchase for some years was finally taken off his hands and away to the cells, he offered to buy Beppo a drink. One must cultivate good customers when they come along.

In the nearest inn they both took a cup of excellent wine, and as they settled by the inn's comfortable fireside, a singer that Vatto vaguely recognised began to tune his lyre.

Beppo turned to the singer "Oh now!" he said. "You must sing that song that you sang last night for my friend Vatto here! Sing the Fall of Cunoval! "

Vatto smiled, not a cunning smile, but a real one, genuinely taken by surprise for the first time in a very long while.

"Now, there is a song I would love to hear" he said, quite honestly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have obviously heavily used the idea of renting out slaves here, and I should really come clean and admit that I have no idea if this actually happened. It was the only way I could come up with of explaining what Esca says in the book : "They sold me to a trader from the South, who sold me to Beppo, here in Calleva" - and that's it, sum total of explanation of where Esca has been for two years. (It says something about book!Marcus that he takes this as a sort of special confidence from Esca... )  
> I couldn't really imagine that it would be normal for a trader to spend two years finding a buyer for a slave if that was all he was doing, so I decided that Esca was probably used for seasonal work, the kind of thing where people take on workers for the busy season.
> 
> However, Vatto's decision to 'turn Esca into cash' is entirely historical : there is a genuine letter from Londinium, giving someone instructions to "Turn that slave-girl into cash".   
>  Apples : Although there were certainly apples in Britain before Rome, the thinking seems to be that they would be the very sour small sort that we now call crab-apples. The Romans brought in better varieties (and in fact, there's a lovely letter where someone orders apples 'if you can find good ones' . Whether or not they made cider with them seems to be a matter of some debate, but I feel they *should* have done. It is possible that by 140ADish, nice apple trees had made their way north to Brigante country, but given that an apple orchard does take a while to establish, I thought it was reasonable to have Roman apples as a Southern British delicacy that had not yet worked its way North.


	5. Death steps aside

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esca in the arena, and meeting Marcus for the first time. The last and final part. Thank goodness! An attempt at writing something which can be read as either movie or book canon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Could probably be read as a stand-alone, if you can't be bothered with all the rest of it. The original idea of all the rest of it was originally, however, to try to explain Esca's last line, which is of course, from the book, but was left out of the movie because it was considered too submissive for a modern audience to accept.

The Druids have a word for it : deathcalled: the word for one who faces his death and knows it, and must embrace it willingly at the last, like a lover.

And now Esca, hound of the Brigantes, is deathcalled, last of his people, and he faces his death in the sight of all the gods under the open sky, and oh, but life is calling him too, in the roaring of his blood and and the heaving of his lungs.

All around him in the stands, the crowd calls out for death, but he does not hear. All he hears is Death and she is calling to him, and he is so afraid: afraid as no warrior should be afraid of Death, and yet, he is.

And now, suddenly a different voice is calling. A man, an enemy, is standing and he calls out, in a great voice that Esca can hear, even over the voice of Death: he calls: "LIFE!"

And Death hears him, bright and terrible and queenly as she is, and she smiles at Esca as he meets the eyes of his enemy, and sees there, life.

And she steps aside. Esca lives.

Later, goaty Stephanos leads him through the quiet evening streets of Calleva, while Esca wonders if it's time to run, if he is free at last of loyalties and duties and chains enough that he can be gone, alone into the wild places beyond the frontiers of Empire, with nothing to hold him back save Stephanos and Roman law, which is to say, nothing.

But Esca is not a wild wolf, he's not made to run and hide and snarl, with all men's hands turned against him, not made to flee to the uttermost corners of the earth. Esca was born and raised in a Roman province.

And the part of him that is still a warrior is thinking now: maybe there's still a duty here, a debt to be paid.

He has no sword or spear, any more, but he has the slender knife, tucked in his tunic, precious as a thing living and beloved.

And so, like a warrior swearing fealty, proudly, in bitterness and sorrow and unwanted gratitude, and remembering his fear in that moment before Death stepped aside, he gives the knife to the man who is now his lord.

"I am the Centurion's hound, to lie at the Centurion's feet" Esca says.

**Author's Note:**

> Any criticism, including historical nitpicking or 'this is out of character / unbelievable' gratefully received. I may argue with you :-p but I'd like to know if you thought this didn't work.


End file.
